MATTHEW DICKMAN was born and raised in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. He and his twin brother, Michael Dickman, were recently profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker. Both have first books from Copper Canyon Press and have received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Dickman’s All-American Poem was chosen by Tony Hoagland to win the APR/ Honickman First Book Prize and has been praised for its hopefulness about the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. "These poems swing with verve and luminosity,” writes Dorianne Laux. “They take no prisoners. They make friends with our citizen souls.” Pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand in poems that deal with skinheads, parties, campus vending machines, biker gangs, suicides, and girls with tattoos. As the LA Times put it, “The background is a downbeat America… but the style looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara.”

The poet Major Jackson credited Dickman’s “artfulness and large spirit” for “telescoping without sentimentality the single outlook of a speaker who has escaped such conditions and now looks back that gives his poems a universality of feeling, an expressive lyricism of reflection, and heart-rending allure.” Marie Howe wrote that his poems are “so bursting with knowledge and love they make me want to get up and dance myself... .I didn't know how much I needed this book until I read it. Now I carry it with me wherever I go."

Matthew Dickman is the author of two chapbooks, Amigos and Something about a Black Scarf.
He was also winner of the 2009 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the inaugural May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.